After that, Garr cut the connection, but Pete heard another voice almost at once. “Hello out there. Hello! We monitored your conversation, and the answer is no.”
“Who are you?” Pete demanded.
“Radio Ceres Base,” the voice replied. “The officials here can’t sanction a dash into Section Seventeen for another three weeks, and that’s an order.”
“Who says so?”
“Colonel Tomilson, Ceres Base.”
“I’m just a civilian,” Pete snapped back. “I don’t take orders from your commander.”
“You do this time. You can either turn back or land on Ceres. Take your choice.”
“And if I don’t choose either?”
“First place, civilians don’t pilot spaceships. Far as I can see, that makes you an outlaw. Out of White Sands, Earth, comes a report of a stolen ship, and that must be you. My advice is to come on over here and give yourself up; they’ll go easier on you that way.”
“Tomorrow,” Pete said, laughing. “Or the day after. Right now, I’m busy.”
The radio voice ignored him. “Second place, all ships out here take their orders from Ceres Base. Are you coming in, or do we have to go out and get you?”
“Take your choice, only I’m not coming in. By the time you can get out to me, I’ll be deep in Section Seventeen, and then you’ll just have to wait, huh?”
“That’s not my decision. I’ll simply make my report to the Colonel.”
“Make it, then,” said Pete and cut the connection.
He popped two or three concentrate tablets into his mouth, washed them down with a siphon of water. He checked his safety straps, then rechecked them, angling the pilot chair around until he could keep an eye on both the instrument board and the radar screen.
With a spectroscopic radar beam, he probed out for Garr’s ship, caught the return beam almost at once, saw the unmistakable green pips flashing on and off his screen. That was Garr — out there. Rapidly, Pete plotted a bee-line course for the spot, realizing that he would have to alter it tremendously once he reached the swarm. Then, with a grim smile on his lips which perhaps is a part of all spacemen, he cut in his aft rockets and knifed toward the swarm.
There was nothing gradual about it. One moment the sparkling jewels of the swarm stood off far ahead of him. The next, they swam up on all sides and he was lost in a maze of flashing lights. Once they got behind him, the meteors became invisible, for then they stood between him and the sun, reflecting light in another direction. But in front and on all sides, they glowed and sparkled.
The first red pips darted across his radar screen, and from somewhere arearships, a bell clanged.
Warning!
Something was close, something big enough to wreak havoc with the ship if it struck. The bell told him this; the radar screen indicated direction and distance. He angled away carefully, cutting his left rockets and shooting full power to his right. Acceleration jarred him, shoved him back in his chair. It was difficult enough to make any turn in a spaceship speeding along at many miles per second,, but these turns had to be sharp, so sharp that he might black out. And that would be the end. New pips would flash on the screen, the warning bell would clang again. With no one to respond, ship and meteor would join orbits and one blinding, jarring crash would put an end to everything.
More pips on the screen, three of them this time!
Pete calculated quickly, drove the ship in a snaking, twisting path, felt himself rocked and buffeted. Sweat began to dot his brow, soon was coursing down his face in growing rivulets.
Then a beeping sound came from his radio, and weakly, he reached forward and switched it on. “Pete! Pete! My radar is hay-wire like I said, but it shows something. Green, not red! It’s you, Pete — you’re coming.”
“I’ll — get — to — you, Garr!”
“Bad, huh? You can still turn back, fellah. Listen, why don’t you. . .”
“Shut up! Radar’s acting up again, pal. I’ll see you soon.” Then, under his breath as he snapped the set off, “I hope.”
Another red flash, and another. Rocket away, twist and turn! More pips, dotting his radar screen each time he thought he would have a moment to catch his breath. Several times he could see the chunks of rock tumbling, by through the foreport. That was the worst part of it, he could see them. When that happened, their fields of gravity which would be inconsequential at anything but close range would catch his tiny ship and rock it. He could imagine himself spinning around in the void, end over end, but naturally he could not feel it. There was no up and down in space, yet each near-miss would wrench him clear down to his bones, pulling and tugging and hammering like physical contact.
He realized he was laughing wildly. They had told him he could not go to space. Acceleration might re-break the old injury! But in the last ten minutes he had battled acceleration a dozen times stronger than a spaceman had to face in his entire career. . . .
Again and again — and once more. . . . It became an effort even to keep his eyes open. He opened his mouth and screamed, for he had heard somewhere that screaming helps relieve the pressure on the brain, the pressure that could make you black out. He screamed hoarsely and he battled the controls and weathered the jarring, rocking, spinning motion. . . .
And then he heard nothing. His mouth hung slack, but he wasn’t screaming. His hands were limp, useless things in his lap. From some place infinitely far away, he heard the alarm bell clanging, clanging —
He had blacked out!
Somehow he had revived, but now he sat there, too weak to move. Radar pips flashed brightly on the screen, unheeded. He gathered every atom of his strength, reached forward toward the controls.
Something big and silvery swam into view in the foreport, pitted and scarred, tumbling over and over, heading straight for him! Instinctively, he ducked, and that took all his remaining strength. When he looked again, the mass of rock had veered away. He could not see it. He —
Something behind him made a loud ripping noise. He turned his head slowly, agonized by the movement. From within, the entire left side of the hull looked as if it had been accordion-pleated. A sideswiping contact with the meteor had done it, but it was enough. He heard an angry hissing Sound, knew that air was escaping from his ship. His hands crept forward, trembling, shaking. He had to reach the controls!
When he did, they failed to respond. Yet something was pulling the ship forward in space. He saw it then through the foreport. Not a meteor, but an asteroid, one of the bigger rocks in Section Seventeen, shapeless, ponderous, perhaps half a mile long. He was caught by its field of gravity, and now he was close enough to see the crags and pinnacles which it throw up at the black sky.
If he did not check his fall, and in a matter of seconds . . . .
He stabbed at the controls, but his hands refused to obey him properly — shaking, trembling, almost useless. Behind him, he still heard the angry hiss of escaping air, but that could wait. That had to wait. Air would not do him much good if he crashed —
Suddenly, the rockets rumbled and snorted and spewed out fire. He banked the broken ship sharply, every fiber of his body screaming with pain as acceleration mounted. He raised his head, looked through the foreport. He’d turned his rockets to the asteroid and they were slowing his fall. But still he plummeted down — down!
The last thing he remembered was a roaring in his ears before he struck.
Chapter 19 — And Far Away . . .
Something was prodding his back.
Something else was lodged firmly against his cheek, and he knew that his right eye was swollen.
He felt cold, impossibly cold, and he tried to gulp in great quantities of air to ease his burning lungs. It did not help much.
A hissing noise — what was that hissing?
Abruptly, he remembered. He tried to get to his feet, but something held him down. The safety strap still clung to his waist, although it seemed dangerously close to parting. He saw the shambles all around
him inside the little ship and realized that the strap had saved his life.
But not for long — unless he could do something.
The cold was numbing, and so completely unlike anything he had encountered before that at first he did not even know it was cold. He had nearly frozen to death in Antarctica, but that was an Earthly cold, something which could be understood. Here the utter cold of interplanetary space was seeping into his ship while the air seeped out, and with it the pressure.
He felt curiously light-headed. Groping with fingers that had no feeling, he unfastened the remains of his safety strap. He climbed to his feet, but sprawled full length on the floor before he could achieve balance!
He did not feel it. He was too cold to feel it and there wasn’t enough air, and he could almost feel the final hysterical laughter bubbling up in his throat.
He spoke — he had to speak, had to get a grip on himself, but his voice frightened him. It was thin and soft and far away. “I’ve got to get a grip on myself. It’s almost too cold to think or to move and the lack of air doesn’t help. Probably I have only a few motions left, so every one of them has got to count. Careful! There — now I’m off the floor, and I’ll have to stumble back to the cabinet and take out a spacesuit and put it on . . . .”
He walked slowly, still talking to himself logically, with a clear-headedness that surprised him. Directing himself, soothing himself. He had learned that at the Academy. It helped; it lent reality to an impossible situation, and it drove into a far corner of the mind what always comes briefly at such times. If I just relax, it will all be over in a moment. . .
No!
He spoke softly. He pleaded with his legs, forced first his right foot, then his left one forward with a terrible effort. Then he was at the cabinet. He brought his right hand up to the handle. He had to twist it, yes, twist it — twist! But his fingers were numb, and for a long time he did not find it within his power to grasp the handle.
Air continued to hiss away with every passing second. Something crackled vaguely, and he realized it was his own body moisture freezing on his skin. Only a few brief instants remained —
He opened the cabinet!
The spacesuit hung there on a hook, big and bulky and impossibly heavy. He took it down, fell to the floor with it, managed to clamber to hands and knees. Slowly, so slowly that time seemed to have stopped, he climbed into it. First his left leg, then his right. His body next, and his arms. . . .
He placed the fishbowl helmet over his head, fastened it with fingers of stone —
When the helmet fell into place, something clicked and within the suit, warm air began to circulate while pressure was built up. He lay there, unmoving, letting the warm air caress his body. It could have been seconds or it could have been hours, he did not know. He lay there until he felt strength flow back into his body. Presently he stood up and surveyed the ship.
The ship had come to rest on a flat expanse of rock between two towering, jagged peaks. It had hardly been a crash — just a bumpy crash-landing, but nothing worse than that.
The meteor, however, was another matter. One side of the ship, almost from stem to stern, was twisted and bent and pushed in as a result of the collision. He could not find the hole at first,, but that fact did not surprise him. Anything other than a small pinprick would have swept all the air and pressure from the ship, and he never would have been able to reach his spacesuit.
Yet he had to find the hole, as small as it was, for if he did not, he’d have to remain within his spacesuit, heavy and cumbersome though it was. He could just see himself fighting through the meteor swarm hampered like that!
It took the better part of an hour to find the hole and repair it. No bigger than the tip of his little finger, it was lodged midway on the deepest crease in the metal. Pete went back to the cabinet and took out a repair kit. His heavy leather gauntlets would protect him from radioactivity as he worked, and that would be necessary, for the science of plastics had come a long way. It was no longer necessary to introduce an impurity into the liquid material to solidify it. Instead, it was bathed in rays from radioactive cobalt, and the result was both quicker and stronger. Pete sprayed the liquid over the hole, covering an area two feet square, then subjected it to radioactivity. In a matter of moments, a solid patch as strong as the hull itself had been formed. Satisfied, Pete stepped away from it, waited until the gauges indicated that air, heat, and pressure had been restored to the ship. He stripped off his spacesuit and returned to the pilot chair. He tried the rockets, felt the ship vibrate with their action. It was half a derelict itself, and it would be good for nothing but the scrap heap if and when it returned to Earth, but with it he could reach Garr!
He jetted off the asteroid and sent out his radar beam once more, probing for Garr’s ship. He found it almost at once, but then he was too busy with the red pips and forced acceleration to do anything but head in its general direction with a twisting, corkscrew motion.
He had always heard a lot of talk about second wind, but he had never paid the notion any serious attention.
Now, however, he experienced it himself. The ship spun and darted as wildly as before, yet grimly, he stayed with it. His whole world became a nightmare of clanging alarm bells and flashing red pips on the screen, once more his body took a terrible pounding.
Still, it was no worse than before — and he had already received his baptism of fire!
An hour later, his heart pounding furiously, his body bathed in sweat, he saw the dumb-bell-shaped asteroid. Or, looking at it another way, it formed a sort of figure eight, with two quarter-mile slabs of rock connected by a narrow neck. And, he knew, resting in that neck was Garr’s ship —
He cut rockets, circled the asteroid. . . .
He saw the ship. Garr!
Broken and battered, it hardly resembled a spaceship. The hull had a dozen large holes in it, and the remainder was twisted and bent into fantastic shapes. Paint had flaked off, quartzite was strewn about the narrow neck of the asteroid.
And then, his hands trembling, Pete flicked his radio switch. “Garr! Garr, can you see me?”
“You bet! Holy space, Pete — I can’t believe it. You got here. You. . .”
“Never mind. Listen, here’s what I want you to do. Umm-min, first I’d better ask a question. Your airlock is shot, you said, but can you get through it?”
If Garr were trapped inside the ship with no way of getting out . . . .
“You don’t sound so good, Petey boy, Rough, huh?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you later. Answer me!”
“Sure. Sure, I think I can get through it. Why?”
“Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll attach a magnet —”
“Where will you get a magnet?”
“Will you let me talk? I’ll take the magnetic plate off one of my spacesuit boots and use that. Anyway, it’ll be on the end of a long coil of rope, and I’m going to throw that rope out to you. The magnet should grasp your hull and hold it. Then you make like Tarzan and climb that rope. I’ll be waiting here for you.”
Again Garr’s voice: “You bet.” But maybe reaction had set in. Garr sounded plenty scared.
Pete cut the connection, climbed into his spacesuit once more, after removing the magnetic plate from one of the boots. He found the coil of rope, tied it securely to the magnet. Then he opened the inner airlock door, stood in the tiny corridor which separated him from the depths of space. In another moment, the inner door had snapped shut, and the outer one slid back. Pete edged his way cautiously forward. He wore one magnetized boot, not two, and a wrong move might send him hurtling out into space. . . .
Space was full of stars and very beautiful, but he had eyes only for the asteroid just below him and for the broken ruin of Garr’s spaceship. In his left hand he gripped one end of his coil of rope, swinging the other end — with its magnet — over his head. Then he let it go.
It seemed to float out into space. Slowly, so slowly. And then he realized that it ha
d fallen short. He tugged it back in, hand over hand, to try again. Again it fell short.
Weight did not matter in space. With the slightest weight at all, the rope should reach, if it were long enough. He tried once more; thought he could see Garr waiting at the broken lock of the other ship.
Short!
It was not easy to see for a certainty, but Pete thought the rear of his ship was several feet closer. Several feet, that’s all it would take — but it could have been miles
Carefully Pete recoiled his rope and stepped outside. With only one foot magnetized, he had to move at a snail’s pace over the hull of his ship. One quick motion might hurl him off into space and then there would be no return. He drove the thought from his mind.
Steady, steady. Mustn’t become nervous . . . mustn’t even think about it. . . .
He reached the back of his ship, reached the beginning of the rocket tubes themselves. And then he hurled his rope. It fell short by no more than five feet!
But that was enough. Garr could jump for it, all right — but if he missed he would be adrift in space and he would get no second chance. There had to be another way, a safer way for Garr. Surely a few feet would not be the margin between life and death —
There was another way! He needed five feet, just five feet more — and he was six feet tall....
Slowly, he removed the magnet from his other boot, holding his hand close to the hull. He felt something drawing him toward it until his hand clattered against it firmly. He was weightless in space and the magnet could hold him there by one hand, unless a sudden motion jarred him loose.
He kicked out with his feet, felt them leave the hull, floating out into space. He had tied the rope to one of his legs, and he kicked out with it carefully. He had played football at the Academy and had been an accurate punter, but now he had to be perfect. He could feel a gentle pressure on his leg as the rope uncoiled out into space easily, with no gravity to hold it back. He wanted to turn and watch it, but he knew that any motion might jar him loose.
Earthbound (Winston Science Fiction Book 1) Page 16